This near-mature standard is able to establish an end-to-end communication between peripheral devises (sensors, actuators, hubs) and ICT based “intelligence” across transport layers (e.g. different network types (Bluetooth, GPRS, TCPIP)). This means that it is possible to use e.g. Bluetooth from the sensor to a PDA and Wlan or GPRS from the PDA to the server within the same protocol.

From the end-user, developer, and market aspects perspectives, another important quality of the standard is that it is jointly accepted by ISO, IEEE and the Continua Health Alliance – giving hope for a future “plug and play” functionality of sensors and actuators from different vendors and thus an opportunity for the development of real  “mass personalization” of AAL-environments. In the ideal world and from the perspective of innovation, the entrepreneurs in AAL could create new sensors and original actuators without worries about infrastructure and platforms.

Facilities for remote maintenances and reconfiguration are about to be defined in the standard, giving expectations of abilities to solve practical problems when deploying and maintaining an AAL-environment around an end-user. Also yet to be defined is the implementation on low power networks.

An automatic certification procedure for compliance with the IEEE/ISO 11073v standard is under development - manual certification is possible at this stage. Certification is probably needed for the "plug and play" feature to be useable in practice.

From an AAL point of perspective the standard implementation examples are very “medical” at the moment although an AAL-hub is defined.

The standard is not yet mature, but AAL-projects and entrepreneurs should certainly be aware of and relate to the standard in their work.

Niels Boye (AAL-JP CMU)

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